Growing Boys
October 20, 2010

We have more news on Roland than Theron this month, but that shouldn’t be
especially surprising. In the first year, babies go through a rapid series
of radical changes in their abilities. They start as infants, helpless,
immobile, and (hopefully) quiet. By the end of the first year,
they’re walking around, grabbing things, and only occasionally falling
over. After all the time they spend learning to crawl, most abandon the
skill as soon as they can manage to walk. The time they spent learning how to
move their arms from left to right, how to close and open their fingers, has
become a fluent, unified movement of reaching-and-grabbing.

Roland is... not quite there yet. But he’s reached the stage where he
really wants to be in control of his body, and he gets absolutely furious
that he isn’t. It won’t be long before he’s crawling; he’s already working
through the movements that become crawling when you combine them correctly.
And last night (29 Sept. 2010), he managed a brief commando crawl.
Oh, it was clumsy, and he only went about two feet, but it worked.

He's also practicing standing up by holding onto things. He doesn't come to
his feet by himself, but if you set him next to the little light-up table
(the same one Theron used), he can hold himself up with it. He can get from
laying down to sitting up quite reliably, and he's starting to try to stand on
his own. (Update on October 18: Yes, he can pull himself all the way up to
standing, now.)

...There was a point in Theron's development when we thought that he might skip
crawling entirely, and go straight to walking. He'd pretty much quit trying to
crawl, and was working on standing and cruising instead. That was... I think...
a few weeks before he started crawling. So I think we're about at that same
point with Roland.

It's been a very full month (...or two, by the time I actually get this up).

Time flies when you're on the run

Grandfather tickles Roland (Video)

Okay, I started writing this entry back on September 15, with an eye to putting
it on the site around the beginning of October. Obviously, the project has gone
badly astray, as it's now the eighteenth of October, and I'm just past the intro.
So, in the interest of getting the firk ding blast thing onto the Internet
before everything I've written so far falls completely out of date, I'm going to
add a couple of high points, throw the images and videos together, and consign
the rest to the void. In other words, this isn't a complete entry, or anything
like one, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

If there's one thing we learned from Theron's first year, it's when to cut our
losses and either ask for help or declare that a given project is Good Enough.
With Theron, we did an awful lot of bloody-minded soldiering on, with the result
that we wound up exhausted, sick, and useless. With Roland, we know that a
certain amount of inefficiency is actually more efficient in the long run.

Roland Has A Theme Song
Yes, we've been filking again. This one is sung to the tune of "This Land Is
Your Land", with apologies to... well, pretty much everyone, actually.

This lad is your ladThis lad is my ladWe had a babyAnd we are so gladFrom his little toesiesTo his baby noseyThis lad was made from you and me

Incidentally... if you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having that tune stuck in
your head for days on end, I highly recommend that you listen to the Muppets
sing "Mahna-Mahna". This is a time-honored method for driving out other
earworms.

Theron At The Wedding
Part of the reason that recent weeks have been so full is the juxtaposition of
two major events happening on adjacent weekends. The first was the wedding of
one of my wife's cousins (on October 2), which would not have been a serious
effort except that it was up in Little Rock, Arkansas. That's a bit over a five
hour drive, and Roland - unlike his older brother - does not like riding in the
car. So we went to some real effort to make it there and back without having him
scream the entire way. That's no mean feat; he managed an unbroken thirty-five
minutes just the other night: twenty minutes to get home from my parent's house,
and another fifteen after we were home.

Theron was exceedingly well behaved, especially given that he had to sit in his
car seat for the entire trip. We went up on a Friday, and came back on Sunday;
Theron was a bit cranky on Saturday, but he was so angelic on the trip up that I
was prepared to cut him some slack. He'd earned it.

The wedding was... I'm trying to find a suitable adjective, but I'm not coming
up with anything that summarizes it fairly, so I guess I'll take it piece by
piece. The Beautiful Woman attended the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, had a
wonderful time, and said the food was excellent. On Saturday, we slept in and
did our best to exercise the boys; I took Theron down to the hotel pool, where
he swam a little and discovered that beetles tickle if they walk on your hand.

The wedding itself was Saturday night, and it... well, to me it struck just the
right note: long enough to be meaningful, but not long enough to drag;
traditional, but not claustrophobic; and very well suited to the couple getting
married. Theron had some trouble sitting still and being quiet (which was
understandable, since he'd spent the previous day sitting still in the car), so
the Beautiful Woman took him out into the main hall about halfway through.

The reception took place at a nearby park; we stopped to pick up some Tylenol
for Theron (being cranky and uncooperative is a very good indicator that he
isn't feeling well) on the way. The layout was... a little hard to describe,
actually. The area was a sort of sunken garden, with paths running through it;
the main paths, and the pavilion where we spent most of the evening, were
raised, wooden affairs. Beyond the pavilion, another set of stairs led down to
an actual building, where the food tables had been set up. (I didn't see much of
that; I spent most of my time up on the pavilion, where the band was set up.)

The Beautiful Woman went to get food, while Theron and I stayed at the pavilion
to claim a table. Theron did some jumping around, and climbing up one of the
vertical metal poles that supported the canopy. (It was significantly wider at
the base, which made a very appealing ledge about a foot up; Theron would put
his feet on the ledge and hold onto the pole.) After a while, I sent him over to
ask if one of his cousins would like to dance with him.

...That was a mistake. He came back in tears, and told me in a tone of abject
misery: "She doesn't want to daaance!" She later came over and tried to get him
to dance with her - even brought him a flower - but Theron wasn't having any of
it. "I'm too sad to dance," he told her.

He did dance a little, though, with a girl in a polka dot dress at the next
table. She was a little older, and I think she was more amused by him than
anything else. Theron's idea of dancing is a bit... idiosyncratic. At one point
he was essentially orbiting her at a full sprint, grinning manically the while.
She rotated as she danced, to keep up with him. So all in all, I think he had a
good time.

An unexpected impact
Theron, as most of you know, is pretty solid. At one point - and I did not have
the camera ready, more's the pity - one of his cousins had climbed up on the
pole I mentioned earlier. That put him about a foot above floor level.

Now, this particular cousin is a bit older than Theron, and substantially
taller; both his parents are quite tall, and relatively thin. Theron stood, at a
guess, roughly shoulder high on this cousin. The cousin was, as I've said,
hanging onto the pole with his feet a foot or so above the floor. When he was
ready to dismount, he predictable jumped backwards - and, perhaps equally
predictably, he failed to look back first. So, in the midst of leaping
backwards, he ran smack into my son.

Theron... 'staggered' is too strong a word for it. He swayed with the impact.
His cousin, on the other hand... bounced. And landed on his butt on the floor,
looking comically surprised. Theron looked around, grinned, and went on with
whatever he was doing. I'm not sure what that was, as I was laughing almost too
hard to breathe.

And they're growing up faster than I can type
Roland is now crawling. Really crawling. My wife set him on the floor at Half
Price Books, and he crawled over to the children's books and started pulling
them off the display. (Apparently he also made a mess of the videos.) So now
we're really, really doomed.

So, at this point, I'm going to mention the second major event that I alluded
to earlier: my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary the weekend
after the wedding. I won't go into much detail about that, but it went off very
well. They had an excellent turn-out, including a number of people I hadn't seen
since my childhood.